THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES EDITED BY M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE BY ANNIE FIELDS B *0 1&&& Jrp -<^^^ ^C NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE BY ANNIE FIELDS BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY MDCCCXCIX Copyright, By Small, Maynard &f Company {Incorporated} Entered at Stationers' Hall •/ i'VSU Press of George H. Ellis, Boston The photogravure used as a frontispiece to this volume is from a photograph taken about 1862, by J. W. Black, Boston. The present engraving is by John Andrew & Son, Boston. 1(14505 BY THE EDITOE. It is necessary only to say, in introducing this little volume, that Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. have given courteous permis sion to quote with freedom from the books relating to Hawthorne which they publish. The reader will see that the quotations are made largely from Hawthorne9 s own words, ivith the purpose of letting him speak as fully as possible for himself. The reader who is familiar with Yesterdays with Authors, by James T. Fields, will observe, moreover, that certain letters from Haw thorne to Mr. Fields are not taken from that book. They are printed here for the first time. SEPTEMBER, 1899 CHBONOLOGY. 1804 July 4. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born at Salem, Mass. 1808 His father died when away at sea, in Surinam 5 and the family went to live with his maternal grandfather, Eichard Manning. 1813-18 Lived with his mother and two sisters near Baymond, Maine. 1818 Was at school in Salem. 1820 His family returned to Salem. 1821-25 At Bowdoin College with Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge. 1828 Published anonymously Fanshawe, a Tale. x CHBONOLOGY 1828-36 Lived quietly in Salem, writing for an. nuals and magazines, and preparing the way for the fame to come later. 1836 March-August. Edited the last six num bers of the second volume of the Ameri can Magazine of Useful Knowledge. 1837 Published Twice-told Tales. July. The book was appreciatively re viewed by Longfellow in the North American Review. 1839 Became engaged to Miss Sophia Pea- body. Was appointed weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom-house under George Bancroft. 1841 Lived at Brook Farm, West Eoxbury. Published Grandfathers Chair , Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree, CHEONOLOGY xi 1842 July 9. Marriage to Sophia Peabody. August. Settled in the "Old Manse " at Concord. Published second volume of Twice-told Tales, and Biographical Stories for Children. 1844 March 3. His daughter Una was born. 1845 Edited the Journal of an African Cruiser, by his friend Bridge. 1846 Published Mosses from an Old Manse. Eemoved to Salem. March 23. Eeceived the appointment of surveyor in the Custom-house at Salem. June 22. His son Julian born in Boston. 1849 Lost his office in the Custom-house. July 31. His mother died in his house. 1850 Published The Scarlet Letter. Eernoved to Lenox, leaving Salem forever. xii CHRONOLOGY 1850-51 Wrote The House of the Seven Gables. 1851 Published The House of the Seven Gables, True Stories from History and Biography, and The Snow Image, and Other Tales. May 20. His second daughter, Rose, born. 1851-52 Winter. Moved his family to West New ton while looking for a house to buy. 1852 June. Bought The Wayside in Concord, and moved into it. Published The Blithedale Romance and A Wonder-book for Children. September. Published a Life of Franklin Pierce. 1853 Published Tanglewood Tales. March. Nominated and confirmed Amer ican consul at Liverpool. July. Sailed for England. CHEONOLOGY xiii 1854 Eepublished Mosses from an Old Manse, revised and enlarged. 1855 Visited the "Lake Country.77 1857 Fall. Resigned his office as consul. 1858 January 3. Left London with his family for a two years' tour on the Continent. February-May. Lived in Eome. Summer. Spent in and near Florence. Began The Marble Faun. 1858-59 Winter. Lived in Eome. 1859 Spring. Eeturned to England to write. 1860 March. Finished and published The Mar ble Faun. June. Eeturned home to America. xiv CHBONOLOGY 1862 February. Took a trip to Washington and into Virginia in the track of the armies. March. Eeturned to Concord. 1863 Published Our Old Home. 1864 May 14. Left Concord with Franklin Pierce for a tour in Northern New Eng land. May 19. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, N.H. 1868 Passages from the American Note-books published. 1870 Passages from the English Note-books pub lished. 1871 Passages from tJie French and Italian Note books published. 1872 Septimius Felton published. CHBOSTOLOGY xv 1876 The Dolliver Romance, and Other Pieces, and Fanshawe, and Other Pieces (now first collected ), published. 1877 Legends of New England, Legends of the Province House, Tales of the White Hills, and A Virtuoso7 s Collection, and Other Tales, published. 1883 Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, Sketches and Studies, Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers, and Complete Works published. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. I. IN the year 1804, was born, Salem, Ms birthplace, was a flourishing town. Cultivated persons were living there, and many of his con temporaries were men and women accus tomed to the finest amenities of social life. His father, a lover of books and a silent man, was a sea-captain, like so many of the most respectable men of that period. He died at Surinam of fever, when he was only little more than thirty years of age, leaving his wife with three children to weep for him. She was only twenty-eight when he died ; but she shut herself into her own room, where she remained for the greater part of the forty subsequent years of her ex istence. Hawthorne was an only son, adored by his mother ; but, deprived of society by her hermit-like habits, he 2 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE grew up a lonely child. Dr. Worcester, the compiler of the American Dictionary bearing his iiame? was Hawthorne's de voted instructor/ There was probably no one his superior at that time, but the cheerful habit of a continuous school and school-boy companionship was never a part of Hawthorne's experience and happiness. In a brief autobiography he says of these early days : — "I was born in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, in a house built by my grandfather, who was a maritime per sonage. The old household estate was in another part of the town, and had descended in the family ever since the settlement of the country ; but this old man of the sea exchanged it for a lot of land near the wharves and convenient to his business, where he built the house (which is still standing) and laid out a garden, where I rolled on a grass plot under an apple-tree and picked abun dant currants. . . . NATHANIEL HAWTHOBNE 3 "One of the peculiarities of my boy hood was a grievous disinclination to go to school ; and (Providence favoring me in this natural repugnance) I never did go half as much as other boys, partly owing to delicate health (which I made the most of for the purpose) and partly because, much of the time, there were no schools within reach. " Hawthorne's lameness when a boy of nine years, the result of accident in a game of bat and ball, threatened at one time to be permanent. For three years he was left much to his own devices with respect to reading and study. His sis ter Elizabeth says, in a letter written to his children, "Undoubtedly, he would have wanted many of the qualities which distinguished him in after life if his genius had not been thus shielded in childhood.7' Perhaps it was with some thought of recovering the boy's perfect strength at this time that the family went away far 4 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE into the wilderness to a place owned by his uncle, near Baymond, on Sebago Lake. It was of the life at Sebago that Hawthorne chiefly loved to speak in his later days. His mother and sisters en joyed the freedom and the solitude ap parently as well as he ; for, when his mother determined to send him back to Salem to prepare for college, the family remained behind until 1820, the year previous to Hawthorne's entrance into Bowdoin College. "The immense State of Maine, in the year 1818, " writes Henry James, " must have had an even more magnificently natural character than it possesses at the present day; and the uncle's dwelling, in conse quence of being in a little smarter style than the primitive structures that surrounded it, was known by the vil lagers as ' Manning7 s Folly. ? 7 ? Haw thorne spoke of the place to a friend later in life as the one where "I first got my cursed habits of solitude" ; but, how- NATHANIEL HAWTIIOEXE 5 ever the loveliness of Nature may have confirmed him in the power of remote living, we have seen how he had been accustomed in the world of a large town to live apart from men in a way much more difficult to support. "I lived/' he said, ' i in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." Hawthorne wrote to his sister Eliza beth, while she was still in this paradise and he in Salem at the home of one of his kind uncles : — "SEPT. 28, 1819. "Dear Sister, — ... I do not know what to do with n^self here. I shall never be contented here I am sure. I now go to a five-dollar school, — I that have been to a ten- dollar one, i O Lucifer, son of the morning, how art thou fallen! ' I wish I was but in Raymond, and I should be happy. But ' 'twas light that ne'er shall shine again on life's dull stream.' I have read Waverlcy, The Mys- 6 ISTATHAOTEL HAWTHOBKE teries of Udolpho, The Adventures of Fer dinand Count Fathom, Roderick Random, and the first volume of The Arabian Nights." . . . And to his mother he says : " I dreamed the other night that I was walking by the Sebago, and, when I awoke, was so angry at finding it all a delusion, that I gave Uncle Eobert (who sleeps with me) a most horrible kick. I don't read so much now as I did, because I am more taken up in studying. I am quite recon ciled to going to college, since I am to spend the vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a great deal to throw away. I have not yet con cluded what profession I shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I should not think that even you could desire to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as calm and as tranquil as — NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE 7 a puddle of water. As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one- half of them (upon a moderate calcula tion) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, then, seems to be 'Hobson's choice ' ; but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fel low-creatures. And it would weigh very heavily on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient ad inferum, which, being interpreted, is Ho the realms below.' Oh that I were rich enough to live without a profession! What do you think of my becoming an author, and re lying for support upon my pen ! Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwrit ing is very author-like. How proud you would be to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest pro ductions of the scribbling sons of John Bull ! But authors are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. I am in the same predicament as 8 NATHANIEL HAWTHOEKE the honest gentleman in Espriellctfs Let ters : — 1 1 am an Englishman, and naked I stand here, A- musing in my mind what garment I shall wear. ? . . . Your affectionate son, "NATHL. HATHORNE. " Do not show this letter.'7 He seems to have written to his mother out of the fulness of his heart, as he sel dom, if ever, allowed himself to do with any one else ; and yet there is a frankness in all his friendly letters quite at vari- ence with his restricted power of expres sion face to face. At Bowdoin College, Hawthorne found three lifelong friends : Longfellow, whom he knew then but slightly ; Franklin Pierce ; and Horatio Bridge. To the latter he addressed the beautiful prefa tory letter affixed to The Snoio Image, NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE 9 and Other Tales, now incorporated in the Twice-told Tales. He writes: "If any body is responsible at this day for my being an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came ; but while we were lads together at a country col lege, gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall academic pines or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin, or shooting pigeons or grey squirrels in the woods, or bat- fowling in the summer twilight, or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest, though you and I will never cast a line in it again, — two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowl edge now), doing a hundred things the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us, — still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction." "A very pretty picture," as Henry 10 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE James says ; " but it is a picture of boys at school rather thau that of Englishmen of the same age at Oxford and Cam bridge, the advantages of which great institutions Hawthorne could never know. . . . Bowdoin College at this time/7 continues Mr. James, "was a homely, simple, frugal, ' country col lege' of the old-fashioned American stamp, exerting within its limits a civilizing influence, working amid the forests and the lakes, the log houses and the clearings, towards the amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering a very sufficient education to the future lawyers, merchants, clergy men, politicians, and editors of the very active and knowledge-loving community that supported it." In such an atmosphere, virtues which were Hawthorne's, of probity and truth fulness, found opportunity to make them selves evident. A letter addressed by the president of Bowdoin College to his NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 11 mother asks her co-operation "in the attempt to induce your son faithfully to observe the laws of this institution, ? 7 and adds, "Perhaps he might not have gamed, were it not for the influence of a student we have dismissed from college. ? ? This letter was apparently sent back for Hawthorne to read, who replies: "I was fully as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed me, and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to commence play ing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced by another into any thing wrong.7' One thing may be observed with toler able clearness, — that Hawthorne was to find small external aid to education. The true preparation for the career which already lay duskily outlined be fore him came from his unusual power of reading. It is true that he found Hume's History dull, and laid it aside for another season ; but French and 12 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE English literature, generally speaking, he gradually made his own. His impatience to get home for his college vacations already shows the strong and sometimes wilful determina tion which marked his character. He writes to his sister Louisa, "It is expe dient for me to return to Salem imme diately 7 ' ; and, after giving his reasons, he adds : "If you are at a loss for an excuse, say that mother is out of health or Uncle Robert is going on a journey on account of his health and wishes me to attend him, ... or, if none of these ex cuses suit you, write and order me to come home without any. If you do not, I shall certainly forge a letter ; for I WILL be at home within a week.'7 Perhaps these examples do not pre cisely illustrate what Mr. Fields, in his Yesterdays with Authors, calls the "stern probity " of Hawthorne, nor his truth fulness ; but he was still young and wil ful. That the virtues of truth and NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 13 honesty were his in a marked degree may be seen constantly in his future career. He never possessed a super abundance of money, but no temptation ever lured him into buying, or letting any member of his family buy, anything which he could not pay for at once. He practised no self-deception upon this head, never fancying that his books should bring more money than the mar ket for them warranted, and never mort gaging his brains in advance. Hawthorne was of age when he left college with the determination, as we have seen, of looking about him before deciding positively upon his choice of a profession ; but no one could have fore seen, least of all himself, the solitary condition in which he was to pass the next twelve or fourteen years in his mother's house in Salem. He could not be called idle, though, as his son Julian says, " there was an indolence in his nat ure such as, by the mercy of Providence, 14 NATHANIEL HAWTHOBNE is not seldom found to mark the early years of those who have some great mis sion to perform in the world ' ? ; yet he set himself sedulously to his task of com position. He tried his hand at verse, but soon told his sister Elizabeth there would be no more of that. At the same time he was writing a book called Seven Tales of my Native Land, of which his sister said, "I read these tales, and liked them." Hawthorne carried them, he tells us, to seventeen publishers un successfully. Surely, not an encourag ing beginning for a young author ! He persevered, however, and wrote a con secutive tale called Fanshawe, which Miss Hawthorne liked less well than the Seven Tales; but Hawthorne was de termined to publish it, which he did in Boston, " paying one hundred dol lars for the purpose." It must have had a small circulation, because Haw thorne was very successful in destroy ing it later, hardly more than six copies NATHANIEL HAWTHOBNE 15 being now known to exist. Mr. Lathrop, the son-in-law of Hawthorne, gives a synopsis of and extracts from the tale ; but the author wrote once to Mr. Fields: "You make an inquiry about some supposed former publication of mine. I cannot be sworn to make cor rect answers as to all the literary or other follies of my nonage, and I earnestly recommend you not to brush away the dust that may have gathered over them. Whatever might do me credit you may be pretty sure I should be ready enough to bring forward. Anything else it is our mutual interest to conceal ; and, so far from assisting your researches in that direction, I especially enjoin it on you, my dear friend, not to read any unac knowledged page that you may suppose to be mine." The copy of Fanshawe in the possession of Mr. Fields was put away and jealously guarded ; but others have appeared, from which the gist of the book has been 16 NATHANIEL HAWTHOBXE given to the world. There is one pas sage quoted by Hawthorne's son-in-law which has a beauty all its own and a distinctly autobiographical interest. It is as follows: "He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in solitary study, in conversation with the dead, while he had scorned to mingle with the living world or to be actuated by any of its motives. Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world, unconcerned in its feel ings and uninfluenced by it in any of his pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of un dying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand reali ties. " It appears that he had not yet burned the Seven Tales, which was their ultimate fate, when he set himself to the task of writing Fanshawe. The publishers had NATHANIEL HAWTHOBNE 17 been so undecided about the first book that Hawthorne concluded to write this continuous tale, which he hoped, alas ! might have better success. Meanwhile he seems to have deter mined to support himself by his pen, and he was willing to accept anything that offered. He entered into corre spondence with S. G. Goodrich (" Peter Parley " ) and other publishers, and took advice of his friends Bridge, Pierce, and Cilley. The result seems to have been that Hawthorne did a great deal of work for very little money. The Twice- told Tales were begun, and some of them were printed in the annuals of the day. But the Tales were not issued in a vol ume until his friend Bridge went to Goodrich in 1836, and offered to bear the pecuniary risks himself. This long period of twelve or fourteen years, which was the formative period, as it proved, of Hawthorne's genius, wears but a dreary aspect to us who 18 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE look upon it, and remember the natural stirrings of youth. "He was poor, he was solitary, " writes Mr. James in his admirable analysis, "and he undertook to devote himself to literature in a com munity in which the interest in litera ture was yet of the smallest. ... Of the actual aridity of that time the young man must have had a painful conscious ness : he never lost the impression of it. . . . The development of Hawthorne's mind was not, however, towards sadness. I should be inclined to go still further, and say that his mind proper — his mind in so far as it was a repository of opinions and articles of faith — had no development that it is of especial im portance to look into. What had a development was his imagination, — that delicate and penetrating imagination which was always at play, always enter taining itself . . . among the shadows and substructions, the dark -based pillars and supports of our moral nature. Be- NATHANIEL HAWTHOBNE 19 neath this movement and ripple of Ms imagination, as free and spontaneous as that of the sea-surface, lay dimly his personal affections. These were solid and strong ; but, according to my im pression, they had the place very much to themselves. ... " When we think of what the condi tions of intellectual life, of taste, must have been in a small New England town fifty years ago ; and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form and color, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of them, — compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sen timent, and we see the large dry village picture in perhaps almost too hard a light. It seems to me, then, that it was, possibly, a blessing for Hawthorne that he was not expansive and inquisitive, that he lived much to himself and asked but little of his milieu. . American 20 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE life had begun to constitute itself from the foundations ; it had begun to be, simply: it was an immeasurable dis tance from having begun to enjoy. I imagine there was no appreciable group of people in New England at that time proposing to itself to enjoy life : this was not an undertaking for which any pro vision had been made or to which any encouragement was offered. Hawthorne must have vaguely entertained some such design upon destiny ; but he must have felt that his success would have to depend wholly upon his own ingenuity. I say he must have proposed to himself to enjoy, simply because he proposed to be an artist, and because this enters inevitably into the artist's scheme. " After the destruction of the Seven Tales, and the futile publication, as it proved, of Fanshawe and all his ed iting and minor writing, fame and some definite light upon his future looked as far away as ever. This light needed to NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE 21 come in the form of sufficient response from the public to give him daily bread and a fillip to his natural spirits to keep them from sinking. His mode of life was probably the one to nourish the del icate imagination which was in him ; and it is likely that in some dim way he was willing to accept it to this end. "He seldom chose to walk in the town except at night. ... In summer he was up shortly after sunrise, and would go down to bathe in the sea. . . . 'Grudge me not the day/ he says in "Footprints by the Seashore,' < that has been spent in seclusion which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my companion.' Speaking else where of one of his evening walks at this period, he writes : ' In the pure and bracing air I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky and run a race along the Milky Way.' " Such a nature as Hawthorne's, drinking thus at the great fountain of eternal life, silences 22 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKSTE any thought of pity. There were sad moments of return to sublunary things, but he had seen the divine light and touched the divine hand ; and to one who has known the source of man's great hope the world is never quite the same as it would appear to be to other men. But Hawthorne was to become an author and to bring his secret light into other minds. For this purpose he was eager to make careful studies of exter nal things. His journals, the portion called later his American Note-books, begin at this time, and are filled with minute observations. They seldom refer to his own feelings or emotions or history. They remind one rather of a painter's sketch-book, or they are like the mem oranda a poet might make if he chose to write down suggestions to illustrate by the things of earth some story of the un seen. Yet they are again unlike these, for they are prepared with infinite care NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE 23 in the expression. Longfellow wrote in his own journal respecting them : " Eead Hawthorne's Note-books. If they had been prepared for printing, they would hardly have been better.7' Meanwhile, although Hawthorne shunned the fashionable and even the kindly and intelligent society about him, being in no spirit of give and take, he sometimes went to the seaside tavern, and sat among the fisher people and lis tened to their talk. He always loved opportunities of listening to the plain talk of plain men. He not infrequently made short jour neys, — once with his uncle, Samuel Manning, through a part of the Con necticut Valley, where he seems to have found the groundwork for his " Seven Vagabonds." He founds his claims to be of their society upon "the free mind that preferred its own folly to another's wisdom ; the open spirit that found com panions everywhere $ above all, the rest- 24 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE less impulse that had so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments." One by one his little masterpieces which were to make the volumes of the Twice-told Tales were written, and either laid aside or sent to some Annual or Token. Hawthorne's biographers have made careful studies of the various experi ences from which his stories grew. The sensitive condition of his mind, quick ened by his recluse habits, allowed him to receive impressions on every hand. One of the saddest seems to have been the death of his college friend, Cilley, who was killed in a duel with Wise. It appears that Hawthorne had challenged a young man and a friend in Salem a short time before, the cause being some false representations made by a pretty young woman, a mu tual acquaintance. Hawthorne's friend laughed at the idea of a duel, and ex plained the false character of the girl. NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE 25 But Cilley knew of Hawthorne's readi ness to fight, and, when a real cause presented itself, speedily accepted the challenge of Wise, "in order to put down the tyranny of fire- eating South erners." The result was that Cilley was slain. Hawthorne was crushed by the idea that his bad example had mis led his friend ; and, in the brief tale called " Fancy's Show-box: A Moral ity," he embodies something of the suffering that was really his. There were few signs of immaturity in Hawthorne's work from the time he began to write the Twice-told Tales. The suffering of deferred hope, the con stant struggle to make evident the spirit that was in him, had already given steadiness to his hand. Kow and then a confidence creeps into the Note-book: " Every individual has a place in the world, and is important to it in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not." 26 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE His strange manner of life colored all things. "He had little communica tion," writes Mr. Lathrop, "with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the four inmates of the old Union Street mansion met in family circle. . . . Haw thorne once said, ' We do not even live at our house.' ? The fact that Hawthorne published much at this time under fictitious names served to keep him still further within the shadow. Writing over the signature of "Oberon," he said: "You cannot conceive what an effect the com position of these tales has had upon me. I have become ambitious of a bauble, and careless of solid reputation. I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me by aping the reali ties of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude, . . , NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 27 where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels as I do." The wonder is that Hawthorne's mind could so often and so airily soar above the shadows that at this time hung about him. All that he could yet do for himself was to preserve a certain repose and har mony in the midst of uncertainty and delay ; and for this he formed four wise precepts, — "to break off customs, to shake off spirits ill-disposed, to meditate on youth, to do nothing against one's genius." Thus he kept himself fresh and flexible, hopeful, ready for emer gency. II. THE help of Mr. Bridge in print ing the first volume of the Tales was like the first streak of dawn in Haw thorne's day. It was before then, how ever, that Miss Elizabeth Peabody presented herself at the door of the Hawthorne home, and asked to see Miss Hawthorne. It appears she had read everything that Hawthorne had written, and even discovered his hand under his fictitious signatures. Indeed, Miss Peabody had gone so far as to make a resolve to write to the author when she first read i ' The Gentle Boy. ' ' But it was not easy to discover him ; and, when at last she was told it was "Mr. Hathorne," as the name was then commonly called, she concluded it must be Miss Hawthorne, as she did not remember having seen a brother. On the strength of this information, she called at the house, and asked to NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE 29 see Miss Hawthorne ; but, when only Miss Louisa presented herself, Miss Pea- body devoted the powers of her elo quence to telling her what a genius her sister possessed. "My brother, you mean," was the response. "It is your brother, then!" said Miss Peabody. "If your brother can write like that, he has no right to be idle." "My brother never is idle," answered Miss Louisa, quietly. "Thus began an acquaintance," con tinues the biographer, "which helped to free Hawthorne from the spell of solitude, and led directly to the richest experience of his life." Some months passed, and there was no sequel to this call. But early in 1837 a prettily bound copy of Twice- told Tales came to Miss Peabody ; and she soon afterwards had some correspond ence with Hawthorne, in order to en gage him for the Democratic Review, 30 NATHANIEL HAWTHOBNE which was about to be started. She also invited him to come with his two sisters to pass the evening. To her as tonishment, they all came; and, when Miss Peabody opened the door her self, expecting to see a shy youth, a noble-looking man, with a face expres sive of stern determination, stood be tween his two sisters. "His hostess brought out Flaxman's designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton, of Harvard; and the party made an evening's entertainment out of them.77 Miss Peabody wrote of this evening: " Sophia, who was an invalid, was in her chamber. As soon as I could, I ran upstairs to her, and said : < O Sophia, you must get up and dress and come down ! The Hawthornes are here, and you never saw anything so splendid as he is ! He is handsomer than Lord Byron!7 She laughed, but refused to come, remarking that, since he had called once, he would call again. ... NATHANIEL HAWTHOBNE 31 Mr. Hawthorne looked at first almost fierce, with, his determination not to betray his sensitive shyness, which he always recognized as a weakness. . . . He did call again, as Sophia had pre dicted, not long afterwards ; and this time she came down, in her simple white wrapper; and sat on the sofa. As I said, 'My sister, Sophia,' he rose and looked at her intently : he did not realize how intently. As we went on talking, she would frequently interpose a remark, in her low, sweet voice. Every time she did so he would look at her again, with the same piercing, in- drawing gaze. I was struck with it, and thought, 'What if he should fall in love with her ! ? And the thought troubled me ; for she had often told me that nothing would ever tempt her to marry, and inflict on a husband the care of an invalid. When Mr. Haw thorne got up to go, he said he should come for me in the evening to call on 0>THc " X iJKm/crnr* I-.-** \\ 32 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE his sisters ; and lie added, < Miss Sophia, won't you come, too! ' But she replied,